UConn Baseball Denied NCAA Bid; Yale, CCSU Earn Automatic Berths

The NCAA Baseball Tournament will not include UConn, the Huskies denied an at-large bid despite a strong resume. There is excitement at Central Connecticut, which will play at TCU, and Yale, which will play Nebraska at Corvallis, Ore., in tournament openers on Friday.

The NCAA Baseball Tournament will not include UConn, the Huskies denied an at-large bid despite a strong resume. There is excitement at Central Connecticut, which will play at TCU, and Yale, which will play Nebraska at Corvallis, Ore., in tournament openers on Friday.

The baseball coaches and players assembled Monday at Yale and Central Connecticut brimming with excitement. They knew their names would be called. It was just a matter of when.

At UConn, it was different. Coach Jim Penders spent the night tossing and turning, thinking about what might have been different, having watched upset after upset in the conference tournaments across the country that he knew were tilting the odds against his team. Scouring the complicated metrics and hoping the NCAA Tournament selection committee would see it the Huskies' way. That's life "on the bubble," and it's worse than rain on a holiday weekend.

When ESPN's hosts finished naming the field of 64, UConn was left out, one of the first four to be left out, according to the committee, but left out nonetheless, and Penders walked to the front of the auditorium at the Burton Family Complex to console his players.

"I tell them all the time, 'Don't drink the poison. Don't accept it when somebody tells you that you deserve something until you've actually earned it,'" Penders said. "And for whatever reason, we didn't earn it. We didn't do enough, myself included. Maybe we would have done a couple of more things, won a couple of more games to make it blatantly obvious to the committee that our season deserved to end on the field and not in an auditorium. … The guys that are returning have to use that as fuel. The guys leaving should have no regrets."

Yale (32-16), in its first tournament berth since 1994, was given a No.3 seed, rare for an Ivy League champ, and sent to Corvallis, Ore., to play Nebraska on Friday at 3 p.m. in the four-team regional hosted by Oregon State, the top seed in the entire field.

"We take a lot of pride in [the No.3 seed]," Yale captain Richard Slenker said. "We had a great year. It's been a pretty incredible ride. To end up this way is a pretty real high."

Central (36-20), winner of the Northeast Conference on Sunday, was sent as the No.4 seed to Fort Worth, Texas, to play host TCU on Friday at 9 p.m. Central has 22 players from Connecticut. Coach Charlie Hickey plans to start lefthander Brendan Smith, a senior from Wethersfield, in the opening game, which follows No.2 Virginia vs. No.3 Dallas Baptist.

"The kids are extremely excited," said Hickey, who is going to his fifth regional. "It's an opportunity to go play one of the top 10 teams in the country in a different environment. This will be an experience that will give them memories that will last a lifetime."

Yale, which swept Penn in the Ivy League Championship Series on May 16, added a doubleheader against Patriot League champ Holy Cross on Saturday to get some work, and the two wins pushed the Bulldogs into the top 50 in RPI and a No.3 seed. Holy Cross was also sent to Oregon State, to play the top-seeded Beavers after the Yale-Nebraska game.

"We're not going there just to be an Ivy League team, 'Hey, thanks for coming, two and out,'" Yale coach John Stuper said. "We're going there to win just like anybody else is. We have two things going for us that can lend to that happening: Our defense is outstanding in the infield and the outfield; and our lineup is long. We can swing it."

"We're proud to be representing the Ivy as a No.3 seed," Stuper said. "We're going to play at the place with the best team in the country, but we're excited and looking forward to it."

UConn (33-25), which has been in the tournament four times since 2010, was projected as an at-large entry by the bracket analysts late last week, and the Huskies won two more games in the AAC Tournament to keep their RPI, a key metric used in the selection process, at 38 — good enough most years. But as conference tournaments ended with upsets — Xavier in the Big East, Iowa in the Big Ten, Rice in Conference USA, Dallas Baptist in the Missouri Valley Conference and Oklahoma State in the Big 12 — there were not enough at-large bids to go around. On Monday morning, Baseball America projected UConn out and St. John's in; D1Baseball.com projected it the other way around — it was that close.

St. John's, UCLA, Auburn and Maryland were among the bubble teams to survive.

UConn, dealing with the Northeast climate, played only 18 of 58 games at home this season, and went 14-10 the AAC, which was the fourth strongest conference in RPI, factors Penders hoped would work in the Huskies' favor. Conference champ Houston is hosting a regional, with South Florida and Central Florida in as No.2 seeds. But the committee did not take a fourth AAC team. UConn played 14 games against Top 25 opponents, going 5-9, and 35 games against top 100, going 17-18. Hurting the Huskies, perhaps, were midweek losses to UHart, Bryant and Northeastern.

UConn was the bid stealer when it won the Big East Tournament in 2013 and the AAC Tournament in 2016. This year, it was on the wrong end of the process.

"They can only take 64, so I respect what the committee has to deal with," Penders said. "No sour grapes. We didn't do enough."